ROBERT MACAULAY
STEVENSON
THIS, the most faithful to his early poetic ideals of all the
artists of the famous Glasgow School, was born at 87 Portland Street, on the
south side of the city, in 1854. His grandfather, belonging to the same
profession as another branch of the family, was a very well-known pit and mill
engineer in Lanarkshire, and his father, Mr. John Stevenson, who is still
living, is also a mechanical engineer who, by the way, possesses a wonderful
series of memories of the city of sixty and more years ago.
After an education at the Secular School carried on by John
Mayer, where the chief feature was science in place of the usual classics, Mr.
Macaulay Stevenson went first to learn the hereditary family business of
engineering. After three years' experience of this, however, he cut himself free
from it, and addressed himself to Art, for which he had always had a taste. His
training as a painter he got from the late Robert Greenlees at the Glasgow
School of Art, but, unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not qualify that
training by a sojourn afterwards in Paris, preferring to develop upon his own
individual lines. His success as an artist may be judged from the wide
recognition which his work has received. He was awarded a gold medal at Munich
in 1893, a diploma of honour at Barcelona in 1894, and a silver medal at
Brussels International Exhibition in 1897. His "Fairies' Pool," purchased by the
German Government, is in the National Gallery at Berlin, while "A Nocturne," is
in the Bohemian National Gallery at Prague. His "Moonrise" has a place in the
National Gallery at Barcelona, his "Dewy Morning on the Forth," in the Municipal
Gallery at Weimar, and his "Dream of Twilight" in the Belgian National Gallery
at Brussels. A "Nocturne, Bardowie Loch," hangs in the collection of the
Prince-Regent Luitpold of Bavaria; "The Turnip-Gatherers" in that of Count
Andrassy, at Buda-Pesth; "Evening" in the New Pinakothek at Munich; and "A
Pastoral" in the Museum of Fine arts at St. Louis. In 1907 his "Early Morning on
the Seine" was purchased by Glasgow Corporation for the Municipal art Galleries,
and "The Mill Dam," which was reproduced in one of the numbers of The Yellow
Book, was acquired for the collection of the late King of Italy.
The last-named picture, along with three others, was
exhibited at Brussels International Exhibition by special invitation, apart from
the usual request through the Royal Academy.
Mr. Stevenson is a member of the International Society of
Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, as well as of "The Secession" of Munich ; and
he was lately invited to become a member of the new Art Circle in Paris, though
he has only once sent to and been hung in the Paris Salon. He was President of
the Glasgow Art Club in 1899-1900, and his work was the subject of an
interesting appreciation by Mr. Percy Bates in The Studio for May, 1901.
He has also had a share in several literary ventures, and
among other departures, for a time edited the Scottish Art Review, a magazine
which, with all its drawbacks, succeeded in its object of portraying the racial
features of Scottish art.
Until two years ago he had always a studio in Glasgow; but in
1890 he acquired an old jointure house with outbuildings on the shore of the
picturesque Bardowie Loch. This he has constantly added to, and metamorphosed,
till it has endless features of quaint artistic charm, and the great studio
which forms part of it is perhaps the finest in Scotland. From the windows of
this studio, looking northward over the loch to the Campsie Fells, he has the
whole material for his pictures before him all the time.
Mr. Macaulay Stevenson married, first, in 1890, Jean,
daughter of Dr. William Shields of Irvine, who died in 1900, leaving a little
daughter. He married again, in 1902, a sister artist, Stanmore Leslie Dean,
daughter of Mr. A. D. Dean, Glasgow.
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Index of Glasgow Men (1909)